Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday March 03, 2014 @02:14PM
from the drive-differently dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Apple announced today a system called CarPlay, which integrates your iPhone with your car, with Siri voice control. CarPlay will be offered in Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo vehicles this year, and others 'down the road.' From the press release: 'CarPlay makes driving directions more intuitive by working with Maps to anticipate destinations based on recent trips via contacts, emails or texts, and provides routing instructions, traffic conditions and ETA. You can also simply ask Siri and receive spoken turn-by-turn directions, along with Maps, which will appear on your car’s built-in display.'

Perhaps in the past Apple Maps was bad.In the last couple of months I have been using Apple Maps and there haven't been any major problems I have noticed.It is nice to be able to use Siri to find things while I am whizzing along in places I am unfamiliar with.Turn by turn has been accurate in my area at least.

Volvo cars aren't exactly priced in the stratosphere. Even their expensive offerings are still FAR cheaper than those from Mercedes and Ferrari. Volvo makes nice cars but they are mostly at the lower end of the luxury segment if you consider them a luxury vehicle at all.

Personally, if I had they money to be driving around a Ferrari, I would already have a really nice custom stereo system in it, which would surely have a dedicated GPS system in it.

A reasonable thing to do but why not have the option of layering on Siri or similar Android services in addition? I'd rather have the consumer electronics stuff handled by a consumer electronics company whenever possible. I have a GPS in my truck but it is woefully out of date, expensive and the graphics pretty much suck. Car companies are REALLY bad at updating firmware and they don't do enough product volume to get costs down to reasonable levels. When possible it makes a lot more sense to use something like a smartphone to handle many of these tasks.

(Again, the wealthy have the means to pay for "concierge" services by phone where they can make requests of a live operator who answers. Why settle for an automated system like Siri?)

Just because you have a bit more cash doesn't mean you want to spend it needlessly. Concierge services are expensive and most people who can afford a nice luxury vehicle didn't get their money by being frivolous with their cash. It's not an either/or proposition either. Personally I'd be more likely to use Siri (even with its deficiencies) than some high priced live service even if I had the money just because it would probably be an occasional use thing with me.

Oh the humanity. Having to hold a button for a second with your thumb. Without having to take it off the wheel. At all.

.

You might be surprised as to how much "road attention" you lose performing such a simple maneuver. Anecdotally, I once totaled a Buick because I took my eyes off the road for.5 seconds to check the clock. Long story (chock full of statistics and more anecdotes) short, while your brain is on pause waiting for Siri to respond to that button hold, it's not paying full attention to the task at hand, namely operating a ton-and-a-half of steel and glass at high rates of speed.

As opposed to every other navigation system...

Nonsense hyperbole, and smacks loudly of fanboy-ism.

My wife's VW has a single button on the steering wheel that activates the voice command system, and it's the same system VW has been using for half a decade. Oh, and BTW, you only have to press the button, not hold it. Works as well as one would expect a voice command system to. And I know VW can't be the only one with such a simple interface - Ford's Sync [ford.com] immediately comes to mind.

Apple seems to have invented what a lot of people have been using for years - a head unit with MirrorLink capability. How come it is suddenly wonderful?

Eh, there's an argument for functionality, but on a technical level, it's actually pretty cool. It's actually a second screen capability, not a mirroring capability. Apps using the API get to use the car display as a discreet second display, rendering whatever content they want dedicated to that display.

In a Windows context, pre-iPod MP3 players mounted as a drive letter and simply allowed you to drag over a file structure and related files, which were mirrored on the player.

iTunes required you to recreate this structure, renamed and, in some cases, moved all your files - And don't get me started on iTunes inability to list files based on filename. If you didn't have the 'title' tagged correctly in the MP3 file you were S.O.L.

Nope.The early mp3 player where drag and drop. Connect to computer, drag music onto device.

The first iPod where only useful on Mac with iTunes.

Of course they moved to windows, but you still need there precious application to use it as designed.

Clearly, you have let Apple dictate your narrative.

Nope, the early MP3 players were custom software utilities.

Rio PMP - you needed to use their software and the parallel port adapter to load MP3s onto the internal storage, or almost-like-SmartMedia-but-not-quite external storage.

Nomad Jukebox - USB 1.1, requires custom driver and custom software application to load. "Explorer" functionality was provided by a third party app you installed.

The later MP3 players started using USB MSC.

Either way, loading a Nomad over USB 1.1 was a several-hour-long wait provided the relatively crappy software itself didn't crap out midway through.

USB 2.0 was just wrapping up when the iPod came out in 2001, it wouldn't be in most new PCs until a couple of years later. In the meantime, Firewire was the fastest way to load up the iPod storage with stuff - taking minutes rather than hours.

Oh, did I ever mention that if your ID3 tags were just slightly out of place (two similar but not exact entries in a field like artist or album) on the Nomad, you got very strange things, including oddball crashes and hangs? I got to learn a very nice ID3 bulk tag editor to fix them so the Nomad would actually work properly. iTunes and such handled them properly and wrote the database properly.

It took a lot less time for Apple to go from 'pretty crap' to 'usably good'.

I tend to use Apple's maps and, from the statistics, so do most people. Google Maps hasn't been downloaded on that many iOS devices compared to the number that are running a version with Apple's maps. The usage data is fairly clear.

But in any case, it wasn't a play for dominance. Apple needs a built-in solution that is full-featured with turn-by-turn instructions and the like, and Google wouldn't give them that, so they made their own. Now Apple can say that they have a map application on their phone and it does the things that you would expect.